CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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21st-century poetry
Reviews of latest collections from Alan Morrison, Kevin Higgins, Graham Fulton, RF Francis and James Womack
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
“O WHAT hope for red roses/To grow among the thorns of red-top-hypnotised, populist-/Supporting proles, working-class Faragistes, Workington/‘Gammons’, purple-rinse reactionaries, blue collar/Conservatives, proletarian Tories (Old Benjamin Disraeli’s/Angels in Marble coming back to haunt us through/Poltergeist psephologists, now Boris’s blue collars, his batmen/Bootscrapers)...”
So begins Alan Morrison’s new epic poem Anxious Corporals (Smokestack Books, £7.99).
It’s an extraordinary essay in verse about education and class, deference and independence, reason and reaction, the victory of shopkeeper values and the defeat of the postwar consensus.
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